Readers Quotes
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Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
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This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus”—by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This
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Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.
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Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
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Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.
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The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.
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Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design's most humane functions is in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.
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I have a great deal of sympathy for reluctant readers because I was one. I would do anything to avoid reading. In my case, it wasn't until I was 13 and discovered the 'Lord of the Rings' that I learned to love reading.
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I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.
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I think about the collaboration between writers and readers, but I also think about the collaboration between all the writers in a generation or in a country or across time contributing to this massive project of documenting and reimagining our world.
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He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.
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I really want readers to put themselves into the shoes of each character. So the opening lines are an orienting technique: this is where you are, this is who you are. Go.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.
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My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
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Baba Yaga: I've never heard of such a creature. What are his powers? Magic Mirror: He reads. He reads everything.
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Thus it is a very serious lapse in scholarly competence and/or intellectual integrity for someone like Dawkins, an Oxford don who sees fit to pour scorn on the scholarly acumen and intellectual honesty of others, to treat the Five Ways as if they constituted Aquinas’s complete case for God’s existence, to ignore Aquinas’s responses to various objections, and to tell his readers that Aquinas gives “absolutely no reason” for certain claims that, as I have said, he actually devotes many hundreds of pages to defending.
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A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
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Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
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Those who write clearly have readers.
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Freedom of speech trumps political correctness. I would say our magazine would publish an anti-Semitic or Holocaust denying cartoon if it meant Jews around the world were rioting because of it and burning embassies because of a cartoon. We would want to show our readers what all the fuss was about.
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Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.
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Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers.
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When you trust your readers, you're hoping they will see what you see. Not every book is for every person.
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Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
